Yan Chen

About

Yan Chen is a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Northwestern Lab for Internet and Security Technology. His research interests focus on security, measurement, and diagnosis for networking and large-scale distributed systems. He leads the Northwestern LIST (Lab for Internet and Security Technology) and has made significant contributions in these areas. Professor Chen has received several prestigious awards, including the DOE Early CAREER Award in 2005, the DOD Young Investigator Award in 2007, and the Most Influential Paper Award of ACM ASPLOS in 2018. His scholarly work has been widely recognized, with his papers cited approximately 17,000 times and an h-index of 63 as of January 2026. He is a Fellow of IEEE, reflecting his notable impact in the field of computer science and network security.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Artificial Intelligence
• Theoretical computer science
• Operating system
• Distributed computing

Selected publications

• AttacKG: Constructing Technique Knowledge Graph from Cyber Threat Intelligence Reports

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2022 · 152 citations

  DOI

• ExGen: Cross-platform, Automated Exploit Generation for Smart Contract Vulnerabilities

  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2022 · 45 citations

  Smart contracts, just like other computer programs, are prone to a variety of vulnerabilities, which lead to severe consequences including massive token and coin losses. Prior works have explored automated exploit generation for vulnerable Ethereum contracts. However, the scopes of prior works are limited in both vulnerability types and contract platforms. In this paper, we propose a cross-platform framework, called <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.or…

  DOI

• General, Efficient, and Real-Time Data Compaction Strategy for APT Forensic Analysis

  IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2021 · 39 citations

  The damage caused by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks to governments and large enterprises is gradually escalating. Once an attack event is detected, forensic analysis will use the dependencies between system audit logs to rapidly locate intrusion points and determine the impact of the attacks. Due to the high persistence of APT attacks, huge amounts of data will be stored to meet the needs of forensic analysis, which not only brings great storage overhead, but also sharply increases the…

  DOI

• PentestAgent: Incorporating LLM Agents to Automated Penetration Testing

  2025-08-13 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Decoding the MITRE Engenuity ATT&amp;CK Enterprise Evaluation: An Analysis of EDR Performance in Real-World Environments

  2024-06-28 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems have emerged as a critical component of enterprise security solutions, effectively combating endpoint threats like APT attacks with extended lifecycles. In light of the growing significance of endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, many cybersecurity providers have developed their own proprietary EDR solutions. It's crucial for users to assess the capabilities of these detection engines to make informed decisions about which products to choos…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CT-ISG: Router-Based Signature Generation for Zero-Day Polymorphic Worms

  NSF · $200k · 2006–2009

• TWC: TTP Option: Medium: Collaborative: Identifying and Mitigating Trust Violations in the Smartphone Ecosystem

  NSF · $534k · 2014–2018

• NeTS: Small: WaveCube: A Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, High-Performance Optical Data Center Architecture

  NSF · $400k · 2012–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Yinzhi Cao

  Johns Hopkins University

  15 shared

• Vaibhav Rastogi

  13 shared

• Chunlin Xiong

  11 shared

• Tiantian Zhu

  9 shared

• Kai Chen

  Nanjing University

  9 shared

• Yao Zhao

  8 shared

• Xitao Wen

  7 shared

• Tieming Chen

  Zhejiang University of Technology

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• DOE Early CAREER Award (2005)
• DOD (Air Force of Scientific Research) Young Investigator Aw…
• Most Influential Paper Award of ACM ASPLOS (2018)
• Fellow of IEEE

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Tobin J. Marksh-176
• Joseph Hupph-171
• James D Thomash-160